Bonneville America Forums Forums Technical Forums General Tech Brake bleeding

I have to add to this again as I just had a battle with my brakes that pissed me off beyond belief.
I rode so few times last year that I forgot I had a rear brake issue. I had minimal pressure and I meant to follow up on this late last year and forgot. As I was going through the bike to check it before my road trip this week I found that that little pressure had turned to no pressure.

Long story short I got fed up fiddling with it and drained the entire rear line and started feeding fluid back into it. Still no pressure. I found that my brake tool was allowing air into the system and I saw bits of the rubber seal from the plunger floating in the tool. I emptied the system again and went old school and started feeding in fluid from the reservoir. It got better but there was still only minimal pressure.

I removed the caliper, compressed the pistons, used a paint stir stick to keep some space between the pads and let the caliper hang over the swing arm. Now I was seeing the bubbles come up and after a few cycles of three presses on the pedal and cracking the bleed nipple all was well in the universe again. I did have to use Karen to help me do this but it worked well.

I thought Id share because sometimes things just don't go right and you need to go old school but old school can be a pain if you don't remember the tricks.